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An executive with the owner of the mothballed Vermont Yankee nuclear plant sought to clarify comments that environmentalists interpreted as a possibility the company might shirk its responsibility for cleaning up the site decades from now.

An activist group on Thursday backed off its earlier announcement that it would to try to get a statewide ban on hydraulic fracturing on the Colorado ballot and said it would instead try to persuade Gov. John Hickenlooper to halt the practice.

Ralph Nobles, a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and later led efforts to save thousands of acres of San Francisco Bay wetlands from development, died following complications of pneumonia, according to his daughter. He was 94.

Workers clearing a small garden in northern Germany got a shock when they unearthed a rusted can labeled "Zyklon B" — the deadly poison gas used by the Nazis in the death chambers of Auschwitz and other camps.